The tomb of the Muslim saint Imam Asim lies in China’s
Taklamakan Desert, at the end of a long walkway lined with poplar
trees. An elevated mud structure, the shrine would easily be
camouflaged by the sand if not for the flags, rams’ skulls and
strips of cloth decorating it. It is located near the town of Hotan,
in the autonomous region of Xinjiang, in the country’s northwest—
the homeland of the Turkic-speaking Uyghur Muslim community. For
centuries, Uyghur Sufis would journey through the desert between
shrines such as this one, stopping at each to recite poems
celebrating religious heroes.

“Chinese people don’t come here,” said Tudi Mohammad, a
50-year-old sheikh who is the shrine’s guardian. “It’s not a
tourist site.”

Mohammad has lived near the shrine for most of his life; his
father was also its guardian. He remembered how thousands of people
would visit the shrine in May, when locals commemorated the
anniversary of the saint’s death. But now, he said, the government
has prohibited that ceremony, and Uyghurs come to the tomb in tens,
at most. Before he could elaborate, a police car arrived at the
shrine. Several personnel entered the building with large batons in
hand, demanding that we leave.

Mohammad turned around and returned to his room near the shrine’s
entrance, glancing pointedly at a security camera hanging above his
door.
Xinjiang is one of China’s most politically tense regions, and
the government maintains a heavy security presence here in the name
of countering extremism and separatism. In June, China’s State
Council Information Office released a white paper praising what it
claimed were unprecedented levels of religious freedom for Uyghurs in
Xinjiang. Its claims ring true at some level: select religious and
cultural sites—including some state-constructed ones—are open and
functioning. Others, however, such as the shrine of Imam Asim, are
heavily policed. Some are even closed completely; the Orda Padishahim
shrine, about 60 kilometres from the city of Kashgar, which used to
attract hundreds of thousands of pilgrims annually, has been shut for
a decade. When I told locals I hoped to visit the shrine, they said
that doing so was illegal, and warned that I would be stopped by the
police.

The crackdown on Uyghur places of worship is part of a larger
programme of persecution of the minority group by the Chinese state.
Uyghurs in schools or government offices are forbidden from wearing
headscarves or fasting during Ramadan. Those under 18 years of age
cannot enter mosques, young men cannot grow beards, and no one can
wear clothing marked with a crescent moon. While these restrictions
have existed for decades, their enforcement has intensified since
2009, after Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, was wracked by violent
ethnic riots. In the wake of such repression, fear, militancy and
ethnic strife have grown in Xinjiang.

When I visited the region in June, Ramadan celebrations were
muted. Even in the mostly Uyghur city of Yarkand, the streets were
nearly empty in the evenings and only one restaurant was open for
iftar. Uyghur families filled the tables to share meals of carrot,
raisin and lamb pilaf, pulled noodles in beef stew, yogurt pitchers
and plates of fruit.

“It’s too quiet,” one Uyghur, a driver in his mid twenties,
told me. He added that “the last few years have been bad,” and
that before then, people would have been spilling out into the
streets to break their fasts, but now they weren’t even leaving
their houses. “The economy is down, but also, people are afraid.”

During Ramadan in 2014, ethnic riots broke out in Yarkand.
According to Chinese state sources, at least 96 people were killed
and 215 arrested when separatists attacked a police station. Local
authorities’ discovery of suspicious explosives had prompted an
extremist rampage, the state narrative went, as knife-wielding gangs
terrorised the streets, burning cars, killing civilians and targeting
government offices. In contrast, the US-sponsored Radio Free Asia
reported that Chinese security forces massacred at least 2,000
Uyghurs after a violent riot over the extrajudicial killing of a
Uyghur family that had disputed the headscarf restrictions.

Even after two years, the Uyghurs I met in Yarkand refused to tell
me what had happened. But one Kashgar resident—a woman of the
nationally dominant Han ethnicity—said that many more Uyghurs had
been killed than the state sources acknowledged. “So many Han
people left Yarkand after that,” she said. “They’re afraid of
southern Xinjiang.” Even in Kashgar, she continued, clashes between
Uyghurs and security forces are regular but usually go unreported.
“The government wants people to settle here, so they want Xinjiang
to seem safe. But you never know what will happen.”

Since the Urumqi riots, some Uyghurs have escalated their
resistance tactics to the point of militancy. In 2013, a radical
Uyghur Islamist group claimed responsibility for a car attack in
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that killed five people. In 2014,
hundreds of civilians were killed or injured over the course of
several attacks, including a mass stabbing in Kunming and a bombing
at a street market in Urumqi. In September 2015, knife-wielding
attackers killed at least 50 civilians—mostly Han—at a coal mine
in Aksu. Some radicals have pointed to state violence as a reason for
their militancy. The May 2016 issue of the magazine of the Turkestan
Islamic Party, which fights for the establishment of a fundamentalist
Islamic state in Xinjiang, carried headlines that included “Crimes
of the Chinese Communist Regime,” and “China has adopted
controversial laws on the fight against terrorism.”

The state has adopted heavy-handed measures to stem such
militancy. In November 2014, the prominent Uyghur intellectual Ilham
Tohti was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of separatism,
after he criticised Chinese policies in Xinjiang. In November 2015,
Chinese security forces killed 28 Uyghurs who they claimed were
criminals responsible for the Aksu attack. But Radio Free Asia again
disputed this, saying that those killed included innocent women and
children.

In everyday life, this crackdown can take the form of excessive
police scrutiny. At a night market in Hotan, I saw Uyghurs and Han
Chinese socialising, mostly speaking in Mandarin and eating each
other’s versions of kebabs, dumplings and glutinous rice desserts.
Yet police standing at the market entrance routinely searched passing
Uyghurs, checking their IDs and mobile phones, all the while waving
Han individuals through. One Uyghur policeman apologised to a Uyghur
man as he was searched. “This is just policy,” he said. “We
have to fill a quota of people that we’ve checked every day.” At
least ten checkpoints exist on the 500-kilometre road between Hotan
and Kashgar, where Uyghur travellers are thoroughly searched, and
some forced to turn back.

This strict policing may not even be in the interest of the
Chinese state. Rian Thum, a scholar who recently published a book on
Uyghur pilgrimages in southern Xinjiang, noted that the forms of
Islam practised in many of the community’s shrines have long been
peaceful alternatives to more extremist ideologies. “Many people
involved in nationalist movements were very anti-shrine,” Thum told
me over the phone. “The reformist or even fundamentalist approaches
to Islam saw shrine veneration as a type of shirk—associating other
deities with God.” Ironically, suppressing such types of Islam may
only make Uyghurs more susceptible to calls for violent resistance.

In Yarkand’s old-town area, I visited a state-designated tourist
site: the mausoleum of Ammanishahan, a sixteenth-century queen famous
for composing muqam—a type of traditional Uyghur opera. At the
entrance, a sign read: “Great Mistress ad Poetress of Mukam Music:
Ammanishahan’s Mausoleum,” in English, with adjacent translations
in Mandarin and Uyghur. The mausoleum sat beside a garden filled with
engraved white tombs. The Chinese government had spent 420,000
renminbi in 1993 to restore this site, an informational sign read.
Ammanishahan’s muqams are “a jewel in the brilliant treasure
chest of Chinese ethnic culture,” another added. One pair of Han
tourists walked around the otherwise empty site, their 20-renminbi
entrance tickets in hand.

But Uyghur visitors to Yarkand flock instead to the public Muslim
cemetery, several minutes’ walk away from the mausoleum. There, I
saw a stream of Uyghurs trickling in and out of the Chiltenmalik
shrine, a towering brick structure housing the tombs of seven holy
men. A sheikh sat cross-legged at the entrance, his eyes closed. When
I asked my Uyghur guide whether Han tourists ever visited this site,
he laughed. “No. This cemetery is a home for the homeless,” he
said, pointing to a beggar sleeping inside an abandoned structure,
and elderly Uyghurs panhandling amid rows of mud graves. He brought
me to another tomb, several feet away from the shrine, its façade
adorned with fading, centuries-old blue tiles. Its gate was
padlocked, letting in only a sliver of light to reveal Arabic
inscriptions on the walls. “The authorities closed this for
security reasons, saying the building was too old and might injure
visitors,” the guide said. “But no one has come to fix or open it
for years.”